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In the end, it didn’t matter. What mattered was that she had ruined everything.

The spells she wove entangled him until he was shackled and beaten, lying on the cold stone floor. And he hadn’t even tried to resist.

No. It wasn’t her…

He had done this to himself.

She needed only to crook her finger, and he might as well have tied himself up and thrown himself into this oubliette.

What in the devil had he been thinking?

That was just it, wasn’t it?

The moment Leila appeared in Lady Hardgrove’s ballroom, he ceased thinking altogether. This young slip of a woman wrapped him around her finger, and all his training and caution flew out the window.

It was too late now, but he would not make the same mistake again.

He was getting out of this place. Alive.

And she?

Well, she was free to rot.

* * *

Thirteen days earlier…

The tremors began sometime after midnight.

Gideon had returned home from the ball burdened by restless unease, his mind replaying every moment on the balcony—the taste of Leila’s lips, the way she’d gasped against his mouth, the bewildered look in her eyes before she fled. He paced his study for what felt like hours, nursing a brandy that did nothing to calm the fire in his blood, before finally retiring to his chamber.

But sleep never came.

Violent shakes rattled his body, cold sweats soaked through his nightshirt, and a fever seemed to burn him from the inside out while simultaneously leaving him chilled to the bone.

By six in the morning, he was retching into the basin beside his bed, though there was precious little in his stomach to expel.

Mrs. Hill, upon finding him in such an undignified state, immediately called for a physician despite Gideon’s protests.

By the time Dr. Morrison arrived—a thin, scholarly man with wire-rimmed spectacles and the perpetually worried expression of someone who had seen too much human suffering—Gideon was feeling better.

“Pulse rapid, skin clammy, no sign of fever now though Mrs. Hill insists you were burning up earlier…” the doctor muttered, more to himself than to his patient. His frown deepened as he stepped back, clearly puzzled. “Have you eaten anything peculiar recently? Been exposed to any illness? Or perhaps… suffered any shock to the nerves?”

Shock to the nerves? Gideon nearly laughed. If kissing a beautiful woman until his entire world shifted on its axis counted as a shock to the nerves, then yes, he’d suffered quite the shock indeed.

And that was what he suspected was the cause of his ailment.

Not the shock, but the guilt.

He was feeling something toward this woman that he hadn’t allowed himself to feel in fifteen years.

He felt alive.

Perhaps, too alive.

And that, indeed, was truly a shock to the nerves.

***